Yes, that's it. Thanks. They are all gone on Outlook Express... I checked all the ones I subscribe to and they are all gone now and most of them have no place to post on Microsoft's "social" forums. It's a sad day in the history of MIcrosoft.
As Bruce Hagen says in the XP one, on the page you linked to, the newsgroups will continue to be carried on SOME independent news servers but no one knows for how long or what the quality of responses will be (or how much porn, etc there will be).
My ISP dropped News Groups a couple of years ago so I would have to subscribe to a free, independent news reader I guess to get them and I doubt they will remain the outstanding support they were when they belonged to Microsoft so I don't know if it is worth it to even go looking for a free newsreader that is carrying them after Sept 1.
A main reason Microsoft is doing this is to further the killing of both IE6 and Outlook Express and XP. Microsoft hates that so many users are running XP inside Windows 7 just so they can have Outlook Express. Microsoft also has no support in their forums for Virtual PC 2007SP1 and there was an outstanding MS News Group for it. Microsoft wants it dead too even though all of us without hardware virtualization can't run the newer version.
As for what answers I needed at the Microsoft forums, it turns out I got one answer here and the other issue, since there is also no Windows Updates forum at the Microsoft "social" forums and that was another really fine MS News Group, I decided to just try and install the security patch that I had the question about. The KB article has said it was only for Windows 2000 but the title of the article included XP. So, I figured if it was only for 2000 it wouldn't install. So, I tried installing it and got a message saying not that it was only for W2000 but saying I needed to have Windows Media Encoder installed first. Well, I do ...at least I have all the files but on another drive and a lot of those files were cloned from my previous XP machine. So, maybe I just have the files but don't actually have WM Encoder. Anyhow, I guess I don't need the MS forum to ask that question.